Dubois traveled to Southeast Asia with the hope of finding an ancestor of modern man. After searching for fossils on the island of Sumatra, he moved to Java in 1890. With the help of two army sergeants and a number of convict labourers, he began work in August 1891 along the Solo River at Trinil. The skullcap appeared in October, and the femur was recovered later from the same pit. With the partial cranium as evidence for a small brain and the modern-looking femur as an indication of upright posture, Dubois was able to argue that he had found a creature intermediate in its evolutionary position between apes and humans. Dubois originally classified his find as Pithecanthropus erectus.

Java man was characterized by a cranial capacity averaging 900 cubic cm (smaller than those of later specimens of H. erectus), a skull flat in profile with little forehead, a crest along the top of the head for attachment of powerful jaw muscles, very thick skull bones, heavy browridges, and a massive jaw with no chin. The teeth are essentially human though with some apelike features, such as large, partly overlapping canines. Thighbones show that Java man walked fully erect, like modern man, and attained a height of about 170 cm (5 feet 8 inches). Other fossils were later found at Sangiran and Modjokerto. The Modjokerto infant (about five years old at death) was found in 1936 and has a skull with large browridges and a retreating forehead.

Java man predates Peking man and is usually considered somewhat more primitive. H. erectus is thought to have occupied Java from about 1,000,000 to 500,000 years ago. However, radiometric dates obtained for volcanic minerals at Sangiran indicate that some Javan fossils may be substantially older, perhaps approaching 1,500,000 years in age.

Learn More in these related articles:

...(coined earlier by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel) and called his discoveries Pithecanthropus erectus (“upright ape-man”), but the colloquial term became “Java man.” Only a few other limb fragments turned up in the Trinil excavations, and it would be some three decades before more substantial evidence appeared. Most paleontologists now regard all...

...Sinanthropus pekinensis. In 1932 he pointed out the close relationship between this so-called Peking man and Pithecanthropus erectus, popularly known as Java man. Later discoveries of skulls and other fossil bones proved the accuracy of Black’s judgment, though both Peking man and Java man are now classified as Homo...

...dentition, skull, and other parts of Peking man. In 1941 he joined the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, and until his death concerned himself with human evolution. He studied Java man (then called Pithecanthropus erectus) and suggested that interconnected changes from early hominids to modern man included bipedalism, increased brain size, and decreased facial size....